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YOUR TURN: President Trump sells out U.S. to Saudis

Mark Winheld
Published 9:07 a.m. ET Dec. 2, 2018

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President Donald Trump defended his decision not to punish Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman or cut arms sales to Saudi Arabia for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. insisting it would be "foolish" to cut ties. (Nov. 20)
AP

Two thousand years ago, 30 pieces of silver was the going rate for silencing a troublesome whistle-blower. Today, the Saudis have upped the ante a few billion in oil and arms deals for the trouble-free silencing of another troublesome whistleblower.

President Donald Trump is, at least, refreshingly honest about the current transaction. In exchange for those deals, and the American jobs and cheaper oil he says they will provide, he’s giving the Saudi leadership a pass on the murder of American resident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Even if Trump’s claims about the economic blessings are correct — claims disputed as exaggerated by some knowledgeable economists and foreign policy experts — does that make the jobs-for-blood trade-off acceptable? Is it OK for an American president to be bought and paid for by Saudi Arabia?

There’s nothing in the Bible, the U.S. Constitution or American law that says America must guarantee the welfare of Saudi Arabia — which, incidentally, according to the aforementioned experts, depends far more on us than we do on them. There’s plenty we can do to punish the Saudis without breaking diplomatic relations, wrecking our economy or endangering Middle Eastern security.

Sure, it’s an alliance of long standing. But so was Vanity Fair, the classic cesspool of greed and corruption described by John Bunyan in “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Even Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, no great friend of whistleblowers and dissidents himself, recently questioned the morality of putting economic concerns above justice in the Khashoggi murder.

Don’t get me wrong, now. I was no big fan of the previous administration, with its smoother-spoken administrative tyranny, initiative-killing over-regulation, foreign policy naivete and warmed-over leftist intolerance known as political correctness. It was time to put a stop to that, trusting that Trump’s “adult supervision” would curb his worst excesses.

But two years of demeaning war heroes, patriots, immigrants, allies, judges and national security agencies, not to mention cozying up to dictators, blaming California’s holocaust on California, and telling more fibs every day than Baron Munchausen could in a month, have pretty much extinguished that trust.

The Khashoggi murder may be the last straw, even for many Republicans. Compromise is obviously necessary in the politics of a democracy, but there’s a line between trade-off and betrayal. Trump appears to have crossed that line.